Japanese Comedy: So Funny, It Hurts

For the Japanese comedians who worked their way onto TV, filming Power Purin is no time for dignity.
Photo: Panda Kanno

Yaso, a mysterious figure in a demonic red and blue mask, has transported Takahiro Ogata to a realm of pain.

“You gamble with your life here!”

Yaso shouts. Ogata, a young Japanese actor with a mop of shaggy brown hair, tries to look brave as he is presented with a tureen full of scalding hot soup. Yaso informs Ogata that he has 60 seconds to transfer the soup’s chunky bits—radish, fish, octopus—onto a plate.

Using only his mouth.

If Ogata fails to meet Yaso’s challenges, a merciless punishment will follow. If Ogata succeeds … a merciless punishment will follow anyway.

A piercing horn blast marks the start of the challenge. As dramatic lights flash, Ogata dips his head into the tureen—and jerks back immediately, grimacing in pain. “Can I at least take off my microphone?” pleads Ogata, gesturing at the headset he’s wearing.

“You ask too much!” Yaso replies.

Ogata and his tormentor are on the set of Power Purin, a show that airs at 12:55 am every Wednesday on the Japanese network TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System.) Ogata continues to dip his face into the soup. Again and again he comes up empty, emitting anguished yelps. “I can feel the heat in my teeth!” he says as Yaso looks on, cackling.

This is not a game show—Power Purin is devoted mostly to humorous skits performed by a cast of young comedians. But there’s a regular segment on the show that features a batsu gēmu (punishment game) in which Ogata, one of the stars of Power Purin, must endure creative tortures. A sadistic Saw-style challenge like this might seem incongruous in the middle of a late-night comedy show. But it’s the norm in Japan, where batsu games permeate TV.

Much has been written about Japan’s gross national cool—the worldwide demand for the country’s fashion, cuisine, anime, manga, videogames, and consumer electronics. But less attention has been paid to the country’s gross national gross—unscripted TV shows focused on imaginatively disgusting and cruel physical challenges—even though they’re just as popular and influential.

Indeed, batsu games are already poised to make their way into television programming around the world. You’ve seen their impact on US stunt/reality programs like Fear Factor and Endurance, while shows like American Ninja Warrior and Hole in the Wall are direct imports of Japanese concepts. But the difference between the real thing and the American spinoffs is like the difference between sushi fresh from Tokyo’s Tsukiji market and the stuff you get at the food court in your local mall. Search “Japan game show” on Google for the real deal: men coated in oil trying to climb a slippery ramp so they can peek at a pretty girl in the shower. A machine that whacks contestants in the groin. Or a guy bobbing for radishes in scalding fish broth.

On the set of Power Purin, Ogata has failed the boiling-soup test, extracting only a couple of ingredients before his time runs out. Now he’s faced with a new challenge: Grope around inside a small box and try to deduce what it contains. Thanks to a window on the opposite side of the box, viewers already know what’s there: a trio of live scorpions.

The air horn wails again, and Ogata jams his hands into the holes. His fingers close on one of the scorpions, and with a shriek he jerks back, flinging the creature down on the set. Crew members back away as the scorpion scurries toward the cameras. “I know what’s in the box!” Ogata cries, his hand raised like an eager student.

Yaso is having none of it. (He’s actually fellow Power Purin star Hiroyuki Yasoshima, dressed in a mask and velvet suit.) The point was to guess what was in the box without seeing it. When Ogata inadvertently flung the scorpion onto the set, he violated the rules. Another challenge failed.

This segment may not look like much fun for Ogata, but it’s a point of pride for a cast member to be chosen to star in the show’s batsu game. Japan has quiz shows and athletic challenges like Sasuke that invite the general public to participate in ways that Western game shows do. But a good chunk of games on Japanese television feature comedians and TV personalities, not average citizens. The prize element is removed; these shows are pure spectacle, with the focus on punishing losers rather than rewarding winners. Like many Japanese comedians, Ogata was formally trained at a humor academy, and part of that training was to be entertaining while enduring things like batsu games. Ogata works for the Japanese comedy juggernaut Yoshimoto Kogyo. In fact, everyone on this soundstage is employed by the company—the cast, the director, even the camera operators. In addition to being one of the nation’s largest TV production companies, Yoshimoto manages 800 of the biggest performers and owns many of the hottest comedy theaters. “Some people say that comedy should be nice and clean,” says Hiroshi Osaki, the conglomerate’s president. “That’s just not so. People retain a vicious sense of humor and a vicious nature.” That’s why watching comedians react to unexpected torments can be so compelling. Yoshimoto Kogyo played a crucial rule in refining the modern Japanese game formula, and it’s currently airing more than a dozen variety programs that feature batsu game segments.

“In Japan, Yoshimoto equals comedy,” Osaki says. “All you have to do is drop our name and someone might laugh. And that’s what we want in a wider territory.” The company has taken some tentative steps to export pure, unvarnished Japanese game shows to a worldwide audience. But can Yoshimoto surmount differences in language, culture, and taste? And is the world ready for this brand of punishing play?

As Ogata tries to make the best of steaming soup and stinging arthropods on the set of Power Purin, Horie B-Men stands off to the side monitoring the mayhem. B-Men is one of Yoshimoto Kogyo’s 100-plus TV writers, who are responsible for filling 3,500 episodes a year with dialog, skits, and batsu games. “Since this is a late-night show, viewers want something exciting,” B-Men says. To meet that need, he and his colleagues are constantly brainstorming new ideas for fresh challenges. To keep costs down, they devise scenarios that find interesting new uses for old standbys like the giant hammer, the tank full of eels, and other bizarre paraphernalia they get from prop companies.

Oh, and the writers and producers also try not to kill or maim their performers. “You have to maintain safety,” says Aki Yorihiro, CEO of the company’s new American subsidiary, Yoshimoto Entertainment USA. “But first and foremost it has to be entertaining. Our comedians are playing a real game, and they are subjected to real punishments. But their reactions, their state of mind, their overall attitude … all of that combines to make it entertaining.”

Copycat Contests

Japanese television doesn’t always translate in the West, but that hasn’t kept producers from developing their own versions. Consider these international imitators.

Takeshi’s Castle

This series, which ran from 1986 to 1989, had contestants navigating absurd obstacle courses before a final battle with TV personality “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. Kitano also peppered the contestants with ridicule as they competed.

Wipeout

The 2008 ABC series was sued for its similarites to Takeshi’s Castle and two other Japanese game shows. Takeshi’s Castle ran on SpikeTV with an English overdub as MXC (Most Extreme Elimination Challenge).

“Brain Wall”

Dubbed “Human Tetris,” this sequence on the Japanese variety show Minasan no Okage Deshita forced celebrity contestants to strike poses so they could fit through oddly shaped holes in an oncoming wall.

Hole in the Wall

This officially licensed US adaptation of “Brain Wall” debuted on Fox in 2008 and moved to Cartoon Network in 2010. Local versions of the show were also made in some 40 countries.

“Silent Library”

This sequence from the long-running show Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! made comedians endure torments and indignities—like having nose hairs plucked out—while maintaining complete silence, so as not to disturb other patrons.

Silent Library

MTV’s version of the segment ran for 89 episodes. Many featured D-list celebs and MTV reality show stars, like the cast of Jersey Shore. A UK adaptation called Fist of Zen was also made.

“Cut!” yells the director of Power Purin. Ogata and his colleagues retire to their dressing room, exhausted—this is their fourth straight day of shooting. The comedians compare batsu-game horror stories. One performer had to eat a raw lemon, skin and all. Another was forced to sniff the seat of a colleague’s pants after it had been scorched by a flame.

Some observers have suggested that the danger and pain of batsu games are exaggerated for dramatic effect—for instance, there was no way for Power Purin viewers to know whether the soup was actually boiling. But Ogata claims, through a translator, that it really was skin-searingly hot. Gum-blisteringly hot. “Hot!” he insists, the only English word I’ve heard him use all day.

Comedians have not always been the go-to stars of Japanese game shows. The popular 1977 series The Trans America Ultra Quiz sent ordinary people to exotic locales around the world and made them complete grueling challenges if they failed to answer questions correctly. In the 1984 show Za Gaman (The Endurance), college students were forced to sit in a “starvation chamber” all day, exercise nonstop until they sweated off 6 pounds, and be buried up to their necks in sand. Then lizards were set upon them.

The influential 1986 series Takeshi’s Castle hit upon a mix of absurdism and cruelty that became a template for most modern TV games. It starred standup comedian “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, one of the most popular TV personalities in Japan. (He has since become an acclaimed film director and writer.) The conceit of the show was that Kitano ruled a fictional realm and challenged people to endure a ludicrous gauntlet before they could face him. Contestants had to run up a steep incline while dodging fake boulders or cling to a giant mushroom attached to a zipline as it whizzed over a muddy swamp. Survivors advanced to the finals at Takeshi’s ersatz castle, where they engaged in a sort of cosplay demolition derby. The rare winner received about $5,000.

The program was unmistakably an outgrowth of Japan’s videogame boom; the absurd challenges that crescendoed to a final boss battle were like a live-action Super Mario Bros. Matt Alt, a translator and author in Tokyo, says it was also a metaphor for Japan’s booming 1980s economy. “Shows like Takeshi’s Castle were the product of an era when Japan was on top,” he says. “They were a fictionalized version of how far Japanese people were willing go to reach their goal.”

The giant sets and ambitious challenges of Takeshi’s Castle fell out of fashion after Japan’s economic bubble burst. According to several Japanese producers and writers, there was also a feeling that average Japanese citizens were too reserved to be truly entertaining contestants—in close-up, their faces failed to convey the requisite anguish or elation. In the 1990s a new generation of programs devised a far better way to deliver this type of spectacle: Use actors.

One of the most influential was the 1989 TV show Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! (This Ain’t Kid’s Stuff!!). The variety show—still in production today—stars a comedy duo known as Downtown, who were trained and managed by Yoshimoto Kogyo. It features improvisational humor, but it became a phenomenon thanks to the imaginative batsu games its stars were forced to endure. There was the segment called “Silent Library,” in which participants were asked to tolerate punishments like having nose hairs pulled out while struggling to maintain complete silence. And then there was “Chinko Machine” (Penis Machine), in which the comedians stood on top of said machine and answered trivia questions or recited tongue twisters. If they made a mistake, the machine punched them squarely in the chinko.

Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! perfected a formula that many Japanese shows followed: subjecting comedians to batsu games on the same soundstage where they performed skits and stand-up. Minasan no Okage Deshita had “Brain Wall,” in which comedians had to contort their bodies to fit through oddly shaped holes in a wall that was rushing toward them. (American fans who discovered clips online nicknamed it “Human Tetris.”) On Haneru no Tobira, comedians slid down a giant pachinko board and bounced off bumpers.

US TV networks soon noticed the popularity of these shows and set about adapting or importing them. Takeshi’s Castle aired on Spike TV with an English overdub, rebranded as MXC (Most Extreme Elimination Challenge). The companies behind the ABC show Wipeout were sued over its similarities to Takeshi’s Castle and two other shows. Fox created its own “Human Tetris” called Hole in the Wall. MTV westernized Yoshimoto’s “Silent Library”; one episode saw Jersey Shore’s Snooki fighting nausea as she tried to lick cocoa butter out of a stranger’s back hair. Mystifyingly, “Penis Machine” has not yet been Americanized.

“Don’t move around the stage so much! Project your voice!”

Tomiaki Daiku, a 55-year-old with glasses and graying hair, barks instructions at a roomful of college-age pupils. He’s teaching a stand-up comedy class at Yoshimoto’s New Star Creation school in Tokyo. The students take turns dashing to the center of the room, where they recite a comedy routine. “Don’t make fun of women; most of your live audiences will be ladies!” Daiku says. “And if you’re going to pretend to be a girl, you really have to sell it!” The performers listen expressionlessly, bow politely, and hurry back to their seats.

Two comedy duos—Hannya (left) and Fruit Punch (right)—from the Japanese show Piramekino.
Photo: Panda Kanno

After class Daiku wearily tells me about the long road ahead for his pupils. If this class is typical, he says, only 3 percent of them will have a successful job in comedy five years from now. Those odds don’t dissuade people from shelling out 400,000 yen (roughly $5,000) for a course at the New Star Creation school in Tokyo or its sister campus in Osaka, where up to 1,500 students enroll each year. They’re hoping to earn a spot in Yoshimoto’s talent stable, work their way through the company’s theaters, and eventually hit the airwaves as owarai geinin—television comedians—like the stars of Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!!, who were members of NSC’s first graduating class in 1982.

Yoshimoto trains comedians, places them on the stage, casts them on shows, and takes a percentage of their earnings. “It’s like the old studio system,” says Yorihiro, of Yoshimoto Entertainment USA. “We take care of people throughout their careers and throughout their lives.” Top comedians are on several shows at once, sometimes recording more than one show a day. Yorihiro claims that a comedy superstar in Japan can earn as much as a top Hollywood actor.

It’s a given that part of what these stars will be called upon to do is perform in batsu games. Yoshimoto Kogyo prepares them to be entertaining regardless of the indignities they suffer. You can see this in another class at New Star Creation, about acting out emotions. The decorum of the stand-up class is gone; students now perform with ferocious abandon. One gyrates uncontrollably on an imaginary stripper pole. Two others slap each other in the groin while shouting, “Let’s get it on!” Another duo simulates oral sex with such intensity that their instructor suggests they get a room. There’s a hint of desperation to their antics, but it’s easy to see how aspiring comedians would endure strange punishments and humiliation to stand out. Eat a tube of wasabi? Sure. Nipple-clamp tug-of-war? A small price to pay for stardom.

In 2008, ABC sent American reality show contestants to Tokyo to compete for a $250,000 prize in the straightforwardly titled I Survived a Japanese Game Show. It wasn’t really a Japanese game show—it was the US TV producer’s idea of a Japanese game show, with challenges like “You Look Funny Stuck on a Wall” and “Big Chicken Butt Scramble.” I Survived a Japanese Game Show had can’t-fail material, but according to Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, it turned “into a boring, American-style reality show, complete with confessional segments and backstage scenes.”

Yoshimoto Kogyo’s latest goal is to succeed where I Survived a Japanese Game Show didn’t—by delivering the real thing. For years the company has been laying the groundwork for an American invasion: inking a strategic alliance with the Hollywood talent powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, investing in the cross-platform channel Nerdist Industries (founded by Wired correspondent Chris Hardwick), and schmoozing with US reality show production companies. Now it’s hoping to create TV series that bring the pure unvarnished madness of batsu games to a worldwide audience. These will be Japanese shows shot in Japan, on Japanese sets, for consumption by Japanese and US audiences.

Yoshimoto is producing two versions of the same game show using the same sets and props—a Japanese version as well as a version with American contestants, directors, and hosts. Yoshimoto has produced six such dual pilots, including You vs. America, a quiz show hosted by Ted Allen of Chopped. With Yoshimoto’s experience and warehouse of props, these Americanized pilots cost only a fraction of what they’d run stateside.

One of the most instructive examples of how this cross-cultural initiative is faring is Yoshimoto Kogyo’s The Luckiest. In late 2011, Craig Piligian, the reality-TV mogul behind Survivor, approached Yoshimoto about collaborating on an anti-Survivor: a game show about pure dumb luck, not cutthroat dealmaking. Piligian’s Pilgrim Studios and Yoshimoto inked a coproduction deal, and producers from both outfits met for an epic brainstorming session in Tokyo. Japanese-born Masi Oka of Heroes and Hawaii Five-0 fame was brought in as a consultant. (According to Oka, it’s easier if “a fellow Japanese guy who has succeeded in Hollywood” is the one telling the Japanese how to Americanize their shows, such as using wide, sweeping camera shots instead of just close-ups of suffering faces.)

Eventually the brainstorming team settled on a show that would feature a handful of chance-based contests. There would be a spinning cannon that randomly knocked people off a ledge, swinging pendulums that strike contestants based on a die roll, and a challenge in which participants would don helmets covered with raw Kobe beef and pray that a hawk didn’t perch on their head. Both the Japanese and American versions of the pilot were filmed in early 2012 on a Tokyo soundstage bedecked in faux Roman columns. The two shows featured the same games—but that’s where the similarities ended.

The Japanese version, Un Dake Shokin Variety! Lucky Coliseum, featured fading comedy stars who’d achieved fleeting fame due to a single bit or catchphrase. Now, Yorihiro says, “they could resurrect themselves on television.” But the Western version, called The Luckiest, cast a bunch of everyday, English-speaking people living in Tokyo.

On Lucky Coliseum, losing comedians would trot out their signature one-liners and gags as they exited the stage and then head to a dark room for the duration of the episode. Every now and then, the show’s emcee would check in on the poor schmucks and rub their noses in their defeat. On The Luckiest, losing contestants were escorted off the show with typical Western melodrama.

Lucky Coliseum aired in Japan on ABC (Asahi Broadcasting Corporation) as a one-off late-night special in March 2012, and there’s talk of shooting more episodes. The Luckiest has yet to be purchased by an American network. That might be because the challenges are bizarre, but they still seem tame compared to a show like Fear Factor, where contestants dive into vats of blood to find cow hearts. “Some people in the West want to see more pain or bad reactions,” Yorihiro says. “But in Japan you are going for the laughable punishment. It’s quite scary to have a hawk on the top of your head, eating away at a piece of meat.” But because the contestants on America’s Luckiest haven’t been trained to milk pain for laughs, they often simply look uncomfortable while enduring stunts.

None of Yoshimoto Kogyo’s pilots have been picked up in the West yet. But at company headquarters near the busy Shinjuku commercial ward, Yoshimoto CEO Osaki is cautiously optimistic. “It might take a thousand years for us to reach Hollywood, but I think we have a shot at it,” he says as he puffs on a Lucky Strike. But he’s not betting on Louis CK and Sarah Silverman performing batsu game challenges. And he isn’t sure that different humor styles always mix. “I personally don’t find American stand-up that funny,” Osaki says. “Maybe it’s lost in translation.”